


Splintered

by hops



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Divergence, Gen, Story and Song, finale feelings, spoilers for 67
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-12-07 04:41:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11616072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hops/pseuds/hops
Summary: Lup's too late to save him this time.





	Splintered

Taako stands, slumped over at the midsection, blood dripping from the corner of his mouth. He catches his breath for just a moment before the opalescent tar hand comes back at him and sends him hurdling through the air and back into the barricade of furniture by the door.  

"Sir!" He hears Angus cry out, running towards him. His heart twists. As he tries to move, a sharp pain shoots through his midsection.  

Fuck.  

He tries to raise his arm to lift his staff up but his muscles roar in protest. He coughs and blood spatters before him, leaving crimson flecks on his cream-colored shirt.  

"Angus!" He calls out, desperately. The hand turns as if it heard his call and speeds towards him faster now. "Oh, fuck!"  

He can't move. His entire body feels paralyzed, muscles burning, wood jammed into his back.  _What a fucking way to die,_ he thinks. Time slows. He feels his vision fading before the hand even reaches him.  

"Sir!"  

In Taako's hand, the umbrella stirs with its own frenzied determination. He knows, slipping into a safe, darkened place, who's there. It glows within him, mirroring the fireball coming from the end of the staff.  _She's here. She was always here._ _Of course_ _i_ _t's_ _Lup_ _._ _Lup_ _._ _Lup_ _._  

 _"_...Sir?"  

As the fireball blasts the hand back from Taako and out of existence, he breathes a sigh of relief. His last.  

And time... freezes.  

* * *

When she feels his pulse slowing, his breathing labored, she starts climbing the walls. Screaming at the top of her lungs.  _Taako_ _,_ _Taako_ _,_ _Taako_ _!_ Choking out his name hoping somehow he'd hear. She feels him dying.  _She feels him dying_ and she's suddenly reminded for the first time in one hundred and eleven years that if Taako dies he's just... gone. The silver threads of his soul couldn't save him now. The realization rocks her with a wave of panic, adrenaline, that sends her reeling. She hears him cursing and she knows, on instinct, that the death blow is coming.  

She's screaming. Unintelligible. Tears streaming from the now-firey eyes of her astral form.  

She uses everything left within her to cast the most powerful fireball she can and sends it shooting from the staff, but she feels it. She knows. His hand goes limp; the quiet thrum of his heartbeat through his palm on the handle falls silent.  

She falls to the floor and wails, an unholy, broken sound.  

She remembers her brother, all at once, as he leaves her. It glows within her: their childhood, running through the fields and streets of that purple-skied, dual-sunned planet. Their times roaming, cooking, learning, leaning on each other. The century on the Starblaster: the mongoose language,  _"count the shells!",_ Taako surfing on the beach, his book at the conservatory, the  _best day ever..._ her brother...  

Just... gone.  

The black-curtained room crackles with red lightning. With a shrill cry that echoes through the main dome of the Bureau of Balance, she channels everything she is, everything she's ever learned, everything she's been waiting for in the last decade, every last shred of love in her shattered heart for her brother, and she tears from the staff in an explosion of fire and red smoke. Shards of wood splinter and shoot in all directions. She screams as she lunges through the air and feels every molecule of the column of oily black tar merge with her strength, her unbridled rage, and she sends a flaming white shockwave up into the sky. In a shower of flame and glass, the entire column explodes. The fire spreads, an explosion that passes through the room and hits the walls with a deafening roar.  

She is only half-aware of the way she weaves the explosion around the party to protect them as the Hunger is banished from the dome. Before the fire is even gone, she's already fallen to the ground. It's deathly silent except for the shrill wail that tears from her. Her form is crackling and red, bolts of lightning shooting in all directions and filling the room with the storm of her grief.  

" _Taako_ _\--"_ Her phantasmal cry fills the room as the others look on. It takes her a long moment of struggling for her to center herself enough to calm the lightning, fueled to anchor herself if only to be beside her twin. She hovers close beside him; the fire disappears from her palms and she tries to lay a hand on his cheek. She sobs.  

"Oh..." someone says behind her. It doesn’t matter who. She whirls around with another shrill cry, flame coating her outstretched palm.  

Angus McDonald stands before her, terrified eyes darting behind his large glasses from the face of her lich form to Taako's lifeless body. He's crying.  

Lup collapses, smoke rising from the wavering astral form of her robes.  

The glow within her vanishes into a safe, darkened place.  _Taako_ _._ _Taako_ _._ _Taako_ _._  

**Author's Note:**

> So I took an incredibly written concept from @Epersonae's fic [The Protector](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11598633/chapters/26070726) about Lup emerging from the staff in reaction to Taako's death and kind of ran with it in the context of canon divergence in the finale and uh... this happened.  
> Thanks for the inspiration!! It hurts


End file.
